Why is page speed important for your website in 2021?

Making sure your website loads quickly for your users is paramount for user experience and search engine optimisation (SEO), but why is this?

A study conducted by Google and SOASTA Research in 2017 found that the probability of the website’s bounce rate went up by 32% as page load speed went from one second to three seconds.

Page speed is especially important on ecommerce websites because visitors can grow weary of how long the checkout takes and end up buying a product from a competitor offering a better page speed and user experience. An example of an ecommerce site that has seen the an increase in sales due to improving their page speed is eBay, which in 2019 saw a 0.5% increase in adds to cart for every 100 milliseconds’ improvement in search page loading time.

Google has been using desktop page speed as a ranking factor since 2010, and more recently started using mobile page speed for organic search in 2018. This shows that site speed is essential for any website, especially when page speed can be used to improve your websites ranking on Google.

The goal for your page speed is to make sure that your website loads in under 2.5 seconds for both mobile and desktop. You can easily check your websites page speed using tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights, or another good option is GTmetrix.

With the recent Google Core Algorithm update, page speed and user experience have become even more important, with the new Core Web Vitals metrics being used by Google as a ranking factor since June this year.

The above graphic shows where your site needs to be for each element of Core Web Vitals, and we’ve written previously about LCP, FID and CLS if you would like to learn more about these.

At Engage Web, we offer SEO management in order to increase traffic to your website. To find out more about our services, give us a call and have a chat with our team.

• About
• Latest Posts

Jonathon Roberts

Jonathon lives and breathes marketing, boasting a degree in Business Management and Marketing Management and a diverse list of experiences both professional and voluntary. Having grown up in the thick of the digital and social media age, he has been quick to dive into online marketing and search engine optimisation in his career and spare time, spanning such fields as academics, local business and sport.

Latest posts by Jonathon Roberts (see all)

• Key takeaways from Google’s latest search reviews update - November 10, 2023
• Mobile-first indexing: what is it, and why has it taken so long? - November 3, 2023
• Google updates structured data understanding - October 31, 2023